Mark Livingston: htmlcal

HTML Activities Calendar Generator

This program generates a table-based HTML calendar of activities. I wrote the program while I was helping to design the North Carolina Hillel web page.

I think my program serves the purpose quite well and has some nice features that I didn't see in other, similar programs. Rather than modify someone else's code (in a language I didn't know very well), I opted to write my own program from scratch.

I'm sure that you can think of hundreds of useful features to add to such a program. If you want to suggest a few features, I'd like to hear it. Or, if you like my program and either use it as is or modify it to include features you like, please send me mail. Thanks!

Features of the program:

Simple input format
Requires no knowledge of calendar and days of week for given dates
Table-based and text-only versions of calendar created
Cross-links between table-based and text-only versions
Allows for more detailed information only in text-only version (This is what causes a cross-link.)

The code is not very easily customizable. One could centralize all the parts (header, footer, contact info, etc.) that you would want to change when moving it to a new web site in order to allow easy customization. If you use the program and are not comfortable editing C code, let me know and I will be glad to help. Send email to livingst@cs.unc.edu.

A sample

NOTE: These files are provided only as a sample; they do not represent any real group, affiliated with UNC or otherwise. The month in the example happens to be the month in which I wrote this code, and nothing more. I have left a few examples of day descriptions that were appropriate to that month, as well as some generic events for example purposes.

input file

table-based output

text-only output

C source code:

htmlcal.c

names.h

I compile this with the GNU cc compiler, with no arguments necessary. I do rename the executable with the "-o" option:

gcc -o htmlcal htmlcal.c

That should work. If not, let me know, and I'll see if I can help.

I thought that Dan Macks wrote a nice calendar generator in the Perl programming language. You can check his out on the Brown University Jewish Student Union calendar page and see if it is more like what you are looking for.